In order to make healing more attractive to players we need to lower the stress level and increase the reward of playing that role.
Reducing Stress
Drinking: This is a totally outdated mechanic of the game that has no game play enhancing feature. Only healers need to drink mana, and 4 people don’t want to stand there doing nothing waiting for the healer to drink. They always rush forward while you sit behind, forcing you to rush up, and end up spamming to get people full health again, using mana inefficient spells usually. If drinking mana is going to remain a core part of the game, at least remove the component where you have to sit. You already can’t do it it combat and you can’t cast spells while drinking. No need for a third barrier.
Durability: Why healers have the same health pool as DPS is backwards. For a role that spends a lot of time monitoring everyone else, getting killed by fail damage happens a lot as a healer, because no one can save you when you mess up, unlike every other role. Healers should have much larger health pools than DPS. Makes it extremely unforgiving.
Unrewarding
DPS: The state of current healers is they are doing functionally zero damage. This means when there is nothing to heal or nothing to do that requires healing spells, the most efficient use of your time and resources is to stand there and do nothing. Everyone in the game gets excited the more damage they do, including tanks. And performance metrics like logs and meters are a mini game that most people engage in. Playing a healer that does no dps is leaving you out of that mini game. Tanks doing big damage is exactly like healers doing big damage, its a flex because they are exceeding the boundaries of their role and performing at a high level in ensure groups success. Imagine if tanks did the damage healers are doing right now, like old school sunder armor spam tanks in Vanilla. People didn’t like that then, and they don’t like it now. Replace sunder armor with healing spells and that is the state of healer damage contribution
TL:DR Healers need to be redefined to support roles in keys and have a larger contribution to the success by doing more than healing health bars to attract players.
4 Likes
I haven’t done a M+ key yet in TWW.
Is this true? Pushing damage as a healer should always be optimal play and rewarding to do.
Did they listen to the “I only play healer to heal” people?
Tanks save me, ret pallies, evokers, etc.
You do not need a bigger health pool.
Yes, I play Disc/Holy priest as well as MW monk and they all only do 10-20% of tanks damage when focusing on just damage.
doing damage as a healer is not fun to me, but the biggest problem I have, is the DPS needing to use defensives and them not knowing how to, or just ignoring them, because it’s my job to heal them not theirs to reduce damage incoming.
4 Likes
My problem with this perspective is you are responding like I am saying healers should do damage…I am saying healers should be able to do damage. If you don’t want to do damage, stand there and cast overhaling spells or do nothing, your choice. But for people like me that want to contribute in other ways besides healing, give us the reward for doing so.
3 Likes
The problem with your outlook, is that if healers can do damage, they’re suddenly required to.
Go look at FFXIV for a really good example of how this works. I can be in a group where people are standing in crap 24/7 and there’s literally no free globals to DPS, yet I’m still required to do so as the DPS check requires it.
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Then the metric of dps ignoring mechanics is the healer damage output. I don’t want to heal people so they can ignore mechanics, has never been the role of any healer/support.
I’m more a fan of, “get rid of defensive abilities and punish the dps for not avoiding stuff.” Think damage reduction if they get hit, or stuff that can’t be healed through but rather oneshots you if you don’t avoid it. The stuff that should be healed should be unavoidable damage, not swirls you’re not supposed to stand in.
But that’s basically how it is now?
Defensive are for unavoidable damage.
You don’t hit a defensive after you stand in a bad swirlie
2 Likes
I’m a big fan on damage reduction effects but when was the last time we saw any of that in this game? Healing reduction? All the time, every reason we have that affix…but we never have damage reduction from failing mechanics.
It’s pretty dumb. If you stand in crap you deserve to have your dps reduced to 0 for a while.
FFXIV actually does this. Too bad the game kinda sucks anymore 
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Don’t most specs have three defensives and two self-heals? Healers also have it pretty good when it comes to options, imo. I suppose it may seem unrewarding to make up for others’ shortcomings, but that is the literal definition of support. This includes damage.
This just forces healers to heal even more because the fight becomes longer, up until the mistake is just death anyway at which point there is no distinction.
FFXIV healers have so many OGCDs they don’t have to worry about hard casting unless things go terribly wrong. So yes, you do have free globals to dps.
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It happens already. Because you die.
um.
cries in shaman
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are you sure?
do you think everyone thinks that way?
i, for one, appreciate a healthy amount of stress in my games.
i have no interest in playing ARPGs without a hardcore mode for example.
*then i see asmongold cry about losing a bar of exp when he dies and i understand this planet is filled with a lot of different people 
you’d turn off about as many people as you would excite by removing healing stress imo.
tough to balance.
1 Like
I agree with removing healer mana in M+, if you heal forever in M+ you lose anyway so let people heal forever if they want. I don’t think it’s challenging gameplay, it’s just frustrating when your pugs are thoughtless and want to go on with a healer that has 0 mana = they want to play without a healer essentially.
I’d rather me, the healer, do the damage as opposed to tracking someone else’s defensive cooldowns to buff their damage. If I could trade external PI for as much dps as PI can contribute on my priest, I definitely would.
1 Like
Little hard to think to use them when everything is going to crap.
Umm, no. The stress of healing is what makes it enjoyable, if you dont want the stress dont do keys, theyre literally meant to be challenge content. If you want less stress, play dps. There is plenty of reward for healing, and if youre stressed out and are being required to drink, youre stepping above your level and need to tone it back a few keys. If youre in full myth 6/6 and pugging 20s and have to drink every pack, youre getting dogwater tanks, the state of healing is perfectly fine how it is. My damage contribution is usually about 40% of a dps and 80% of the tank, if youre looking for less stress than healing gives, and more involved damage, play a dps class cuz youre asking for the wrong things